- The Giddiness of Time (streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com)
Although deep time manifests itself in many ways, it resonates more strongly in some locations. One such place is in downtown Seattle at the southwest corner of 2nd Avenue and Marion Street. There you will find a rather lovely art deco structure, the Exchange Building, originally built to house the city’s commodity exchanges. Alas, it opened in 1930 and the Depression prevented the building from meeting the owners’ great expectations. (Talk about bad timing!) But they did choose wisely with their building stone, the Morton Gneiss of Minnesota.
- Morton Gneiss (mnopedia.org)
Morton gneiss (pronounced “nice”), named for the town in Renville County where it has been quarried, is one of the oldest stones on the planet: about 3.5 billion years old. It is known for its beauty as an ornamental stone in buildings and monuments.
- Voyager 1 (Wikipedia)
Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, as part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System and the interstellar space beyond the Sun’s heliosphere. It was launched 16 days after its twin, Voyager 2. It communicates through the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) to receive routine commands and to transmit data to Earth. Real-time distance and velocity data are provided by NASA and JPL. At a distance of 163.1 AU (24.4 billion km; 15.2 billion mi) from Earth as of June 2024, it is the most distant human-made object from Earth. The probe made flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. NASA had a choice of either doing a Pluto or Titan flyby; exploration of the moon took priority because it was known to have a substantial atmosphere. Voyager 1 studied the weather, magnetic fields, and rings of the two gas giants and was the first probe to provide detailed images of their moons.
- Morton Gneiss (Wikipedia)
Morton gneiss, also known as rainbow gneiss, is an [Archean](/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archean/-age gneiss found in the Minnesota River Valley of southwestern Minnesota, United States. It is one of the oldest stones on Earth, at about 3.5 billion years old. Along with the nearby Montevideo Gneiss, it is the oldest intact continental crust rock in the United States. Its type locality is in Morton, Minnesota.
